The
northwestern-most area of the People’s Republic of China has fit uneasily into
the PRC since the day its leaders bowed to the inevitable and declared their
allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Then mostly populated by
Turkic Muslims who felt more kinship with Central Asia, the area had been
incorporated into China as a province only in 1884, after the Manchu Qing
dynasty feared that Czarist Russia had designs on it: the name itself means
“New Territory.” The Soviet Union also coveted the area and, despite repeated
affirmations of friendship with the PRC, maintained control of several
districts in the north of Xinjiang until 1954. When Mao Zedong’s 1958 Great
Leap Forward caused the death of millions, the U.S.S.R. was happy to give
asylum to refugees, even providing them with a radio station to urge those who
remained in China to join them, since life was so much better on the Soviet
side of the border.

Only a few years
after normalcy had been restored in China, Mao began the disastrous Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whose effort to create a socialist culture
aimed to erase the cultures of all the country’s ethnic minorities, including
those of Xinjiang. Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and others were ordered to dress
as Han Chinese, speak mandarin, and memorize the thoughts of Chairman Mao.
While the furor eventually abated, memories of it did not. The drive to
assimilate continued, albeit in less radical form, meeting both passive
resistance and intermittent unrest. The government retaliated swiftly: after
one such protest, a historic neighborhood of Kashgar was razed, allegedly to
provide residents with more modern accommodations. In light of the shoddy
standards that characterize recent Chinese construction, few were convinced
that the action was motivated by concern for their welfare.

Uyghurs, the
titular nationality of the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR),
found the use of their language constrained, beards proscribed, family planning
limits imposed, and young people prohibited from visiting mosques. They
complained that the Strike Hard campaign against China’s rising crime rates
disproportionately targeted them simply because they were minorities. Han
Chinese were moved into the XUAR, whose population statistics aroused suspicion
because they continually reported the Han as slightly below half of the
region’s total. Both the restrictions and the protests against them were fanned
by external events: the rise of militant Islam elsewhere in the world, and the
splintering of the U.S.S.R. into independent republics, many of them now ruled
by Central Asian Muslim leaders and contiguous to Xinjiang. The advent of the
“Color Revolutions,” several of them in Muslim countries, also alarmed the
Beijing government.

After the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the Chinese government
revealed that Uyghur terrorists were being trained in Al Qaeda camps in
Pakistan. Since Pakistan is an ally of the PRC, Beijing had perhaps been
reluctant to disclose this information. A group known as ETIM, the East
Turkestan Islamic Movement, was accused of perpetrating terrorist acts that
aimed to split the region from China, despite experts’ opinions to the
contrary.

Present

Greater
repression begat greater resistance. Worrisomely, terrorist incidents moved out
of Xinjiang and began to occur elsewhere in the PRC. In one of the most
spectacular instances of this, in 2013, an SUV with a
Xinjiang license plate drove into a crowd at Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square,
killing five people and injuring 40 others as it crashed and burst into
flames. The driver and his two passengers, who died on the scene, were
Uyghur; gasoline containers, knives, and a flag with extremist religious text
were discovered in the vehicle. A group called the Turkestan Islamic Party
(TIP) claimed responsibility, with its leader vowing that this was but the
beginning.

Less than a year
later, eight people trying to flee China through the far southwestern province
of Yunnan carried out a knife attack at the Kunming train station, killing 31 people and wounding 141. The
perpetrators were believed to be trying to flee the country, and, realizing
they could not, resorted to an act of desperation. Even had they been able to
leave China, their troubles might not have ended: the Chinese government puts
pressure on recipient countries to return its citizens to the PRC.

By 2014, the government was sending
out teams of officials to thousands of villages to “help out” by collecting
information on local conditions. Residents were encouraged to inform on those
who might have dissident views; police checkpoints, called “convenience
stations,” proliferated; giving children names with religious connotations such
as Mohammed and Medina was prohibited, and passport holders were ordered to
turn their documents in, allegedly for safekeeping. Having connections to an
official list of 26 countries, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and
Turkey, became a punishable offense.

As new
technologies were introduced, surveillance took on Orwellian dimensions.
Mandatory free medical checkups enabled the government to collect DNA samples,
iris images, and other personal data from millions. In February 2019, Dutch
cybersecurity expert Victor Gevers discovered that the Chinese facial
recognition company SenseNets had accidentally left unprotected its real-time
database on more than 2.5 million XUAR residents. In addition to names,
birthdays, and places of employment, there were notes on places that residents
visited – mosques, cemeteries, hotels, schools, and restaurants, all presumably
tracked by the region’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The system was updated
constantly with GPS coordinates of their exact whereabouts.

People were said
to have mysteriously disappeared, with their friends and relatives unable to
obtain any information about them. A Pakistani trader returned to Xinjiang to
find his home demolished and his Uyghur wife and children
gone; he and several other men in similar situations applied for assistance
from Pakistan’s embassy in Beijing but received no reply except that their
pleas had been forwarded to Islamabad.

Rumors that they
and many others were part of a mass incarceration of Xinjiang’s ethnic
minorities were at first denied. As evidence mounted, the facilities were said
to be vocational schools to teach the residents job skills. This, too, became
unsustainable as a result of separate analyses from several different countries.
Agence France Presse, for example, discovered that these schools had bought riot gear, electrified batons, and
spiked clubs – items unlikely to be needed against even the most recalcitrant
of students. And a Chinese student in Canada found satellite images of barbed wire
fences and watchtowers on all four corners. Unlike school compounds, there were
no trees inside, enabling guards to see the inmates without obstruction. An investigation by German scholar Adrian Zenz
indicated that over a million Xinjiang residents – equivalent to between 10 and
11 percent of the XUAR’s adult Muslim population – had been detained in these
facilities, with a minimum of actual vocational instruction. A State Department
estimate put the number of detainees
between 800,000 and two million. Zenz believes that the XUAR may have as many
as 1200 detention centers, while an Australian security think tank focusing on
a sample of 28 of these showed that their total floor area had
increased by over 465 percent in the year and a half preceding September 2018.
International human rights organizations have documented numerous instances of
torture, forced confessions, and being compelled to ingest alcohol and pork,
whose consumption is banned by Islamic law. The editor of a state-run literary
magazine committed suicide out of fear that he might be sent
to one of the camps. Most recently, Radio Free Asia reported that, to reduce the overflow in
Xinjiang’s “re-education camps,” inmates are being sent to prisons in several
other provinces.

Future

The question is
no longer whether these abuses exist, but what can be done about them. Human
rights groups have made efforts to publicize them. And members of the Uyghur
diaspora sponsored a demonstration in Washington, D.C. in February.
Concurrent events to raise awareness of the plight of the detainees were held
in eight other countries, including Turkey, France, Germany, Australia, and
Canada. Whether awareness will translate into meaningful efforts to ameliorate
the plight of China’s Muslims remains to be seen.

Muslim groups in
a few countries, including Pakistan and Indonesia, have protested, but, except
for Turkey, their governments have not. After Turkish Foreign Minister Hami
Aksoy called the camps “a great shame for
humanity,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson responded that these were
groundless charges based on absurd lies, and suggested that the Erdogan
government was trying to win votes in the upcoming March election. The Chinese
government, she continued, protects the lives of all citizens, including the
right to life, which is threatened by terrorism and extremism. Chinese state
television quoted visiting Mohammed bin Salman,
crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, as saying that it was
Beijing’s right to carry out anti-terrorism and anti-extremist work for its
national security. Although Chinese media are not known for accurate reporting,
there has been no refutation of bin Salman’s statement on Arabic media. Calls by several Western governments for
the camps to be closed were ignored.

Pressure can be
brought against Western firms who have been found complicit, sometimes
unwittingly, in the PRC’s repressive techniques. After an investigation showed that U.S.-based Badger
sportswear was sourcing items from Xinjiang camps, colleges began removing its
apparel from sale and Badger agreed to stop cut its ties with the factory where
they had been produced. Initial criticism of the Massachusetts biotechnology
firm Thermo Fisher Scientific for selling genetic sequencing equipment resulted
only in the response that “it is not possible for us to monitor the use of all
products we manufactured,” but congressional intervention later led it to agree to stop selling
equipment to Xinjiang. The company’s statement did not mention whether it
intended to sell the equipment to other areas of China, from whence it could be
either transported to Xinjiang or used for the same purpose elsewhere in the
PRC. Erik Prince, mercenary extraordinaire of Blackwater infamy and later
founder of Frontier Services Group, also known as FSG, drew international
attention after Frontier signed an agreement to build a security
training center in Xinjiang. Prince’s statement that he had no knowledge of the
involvement of the company’s activity in Xinjiang did not satisfy critics, who charged that he was “serving the national
interest of China” rather than the U.S. FSG’s work in Xinjiang appears to
continue.

Such partial
successes notwithstanding, the government is unlikely to ease up on the
draconian anti-terrorist measures that its own repressive policies have done so
much to cause. Xinjiang is a way station for Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI), meaning that it must be kept stable. Stabilizing it this
way, however, is counterproductive to the connectivity and prosperity for all
that is BRI’s stated rationale. It also exacerbates tensions in the Central
Asian republics traversed by what is portrayed as a modern silk road. In late
2018, demonstrators outside the Chinese embassy in Bishkek demanded not only that China release the
Kirghiz being held in Xinjiang camps but also that their own government expel
Chinese residents. Kazakhs are similarly aware and resentful of what is
happening in Xinjiang, although their government has been careful to make no public statements about
it. Knowing what lays in store for Uyghurs residing in foreign countries has
made many of those countries reluctant to comply with Chinese requests that
they be repatriated: interviews by Mathieu Duchâtel of the European Council on
Foreign Relations revealed resistance to Beijing’s demands in Thailand,
Indonesia, and Malaysia. Duchâtel described governments as engaging in a
balancing act between necessary law enforcement cooperation with China – since
their nationals are sometimes incarcerated in the PRC – and their own domestic
considerations.

China has made
some slight gestures toward international public opinion, hosting a group from the European Union
for a tour of the camps that official news agency Xinhua described as enhancing
objective understanding, while group participants observed that the trip had
been “carefully curated to give a good impression.” A school they visited had been freshly painted, with
surveillance cameras removed; the people they talked to seemed to have been
“scripted.” Diplomats from foreign countries, seemingly carefully selected
because of their sympathy for or economic dependence on China, have also been invited. After rumors circulated that the
Uyghur poet and musician Adim Abdurrehim Heyit had died in custody, authorities
released a video in which he claimed to be in good
health and not to have been abused. This, however, did not quite achieve the
hoped for results, as it incentivized many others whose relatives had
been disappeared to demand that videos of these relatives be posted as well.

There is some
truth to concerns about infiltration by radical Islamic forces, though most
observers believe that incidents are caused less by
external actors than by resistance to Beijing’s efforts at assimilation
euphemistically described as “regularization” of the population. In an apparent
allusion to Turkey’s problems with Kurdish separatists, government spokespersons
have argued that since Ankara, too, faces terrorist threats, it should not
adopt a double standard with regard to China. Li Xiaojun, director of publicity
for the State Council’s Bureau for Human Rights Affairs, noted that the
European Court for Human Rights had recently censored Britain for violating privacy and
free speech through its electronic surveillance program – though he neglected
to mention that those surveilled in the U.K. need not fear incarceration and
torture. Yet, Li continued, in contrast to what has happened in the U.K.,
Belgium, and France, there had been no terrorist incidents in Xinjiang in more
than two years: our way works, he concluded, you have failed.